Any day J. Gordon Melton reports for work, California's off-kilter image is in capable hands. People who know the state well could argue that Melton, a writer and editor for Gale publishing company, isn't inventing anything. He's just keeping track of what goes on all around him. Given his interests, that includes new religions, old cults and a fascination with vampires.

Why a pumpkin-head Dracula with bat wings would lounge on a stack of library reference books written by Melton is not an easy question to answer. It goes back to his life as a researcher of religion and a teenage infatuation with the Count.

Sometimes the two cross wires. Melton's seriously silly "The Vampire Gallery: A Who's Who of the Undead," second edition, arrived in stores this month. It is filled with the dirt on recent vampire trials, facts about vampire trading cards, a travel guide of vampire cities, including New Orleans, profiles of famous names associated with Dracula, from Theda Bara to Bela Lugosi, and enough gory photographs to fill a bat cave.

Next month, Melton puts on his other hat to promote the weighty, academic "Encyclopedia of American Religions," now in its sixth revised edition, also from Gale.

At his Institute for the Study of American Religion, a cubbyhole office in Santa Barbara, shelves bend under the heft of nearly 200 titles Melton has developed for Gale, if not written and edited. His "Religious Leaders in America," second edition, is on his computer screen now.

Toward the far end of the shelves, though, the titles start slipping out of bounds. There is the "Encyclopedia of Cults in America" and the "Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology," for example. It's a mere tango twist from there to "The Vampire Gallery," also new from Melton and Gale this fall, in which the most prominent vampires in history are profiled, along with listings of vampire clubs, authors and movie directors, and tidbits such as this: The first screen actor to sink his fangs into his victim was Count Lavud, not Bela Lugosi.

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Collectors might already own last year's tome from Melton, "Vampires on Video," with capsule accounts of several hundred vampire-related horror movies and mini-profiles of the most bizarre and tortured of those involved in vampire flicks.

It would be easy to confuse an interest in religion at the fringes and a fascination with Count Dracula. But Melton keeps the two worlds separate. Transylvania's famous royal is just a scary fantasy, some of the other stuff he studies is a scary reality.